“One day you’ll be asked for a favor. It won’t be anything onerous. In fact, in doing this favor, you will become powerful and also very rich. This wealth will snowball, as will the power. The only thing you must do is prove to your family that you are reformed. That you are worthy of your name.”
Chandra stands up, buttons his suit, waves up to Eli to come join them.
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to understand, Mr. Rathore. You only need faith. Cheer up. You’re with Bunty now.”
AJAY III
Tihar Jail
1.
He is taken from the warden’s office to a new cell in a different wing. He passes many crowded cells along the way, where prisoners whoop and cheer, snarl and spit, where some clutch the bars dead-eyed, some unblinking, some morose, others sleeping, cooking, sobbing in a corner. All the cells are overcrowded, twelve, fifteen men to a space, but the cell they stop outside holds just two. The scene within: sedate, bright, homely even. From a table against the wall, a TV plays a comedy show; another table, low and circular, holds a bottle of Black Label, two glasses, a pitcher of water, a sprawled deck of cards, a thick stack of rupee notes. Pictures of gauzy, hypercolored mountains and Bollywood actresses adorn the walls. There are two beds with thick mattresses, another mattress on the floor. The two men laze there, watching TV, eating from buckets of Chicken Changezi.
* * *
—
One is an ogre. Tall, powerful, grubby, in an undershirt too tight for his drum belly, wearing nothing else despite the cold. He has piggish eyes, a thick face on which the contours of his skull are weirdly displayed, an unruly head of wiry hair. The other is a small jackal of a man, sneering silently.
The guard slides open the unlocked door.
“What now?!” the Ogre roars.
“Your friend is here.” The guard pushes Ajay in.
The Ogre pulls his head from the TV, looks Ajay up and down. “So you’re the one,” he belches, laughs. “You’re prettier than I expected.” He slaps the mattress, his eyes return to the screen. “Come on, sit, eat, don’t worry, you’re with friends.” He nods to the jackal. “This chutiya’s Bablu.” He fetches a paper plate from the floor, loads it up with chicken and gravy and naan. “And I’m Sikandar the Great.” He slaps the mattress again. “Whatever you did, you’re a big man now. Time to rest. Time to enjoy.”
* * *
—
Rest. Enjoy. Ajay’s ears buzz with violence. His skin burns with razors and bruises and the cold.
“You sure taught those fuckers!” Sikandar says. “They were Guptas, you understand? They thought they were taking you for a fresher’s party! Pretty boy like you. They thought you were fresh meat! They didn’t know! But you showed them, didn’t you? You almost killed one of them. You got them running scared. That’s before they even knew who you were. Now everyone knows! Yes, my friend, the word is out! And now they’re all scared. You showed them who’s boss. But remember”—he wags his greasy finger—“there’s only one boss here and that’s me.”
* * *
—
Sikandar is the jail boss of the Acharya gang. He represents Satya Acharya’s interests inside. Acharya is from Lucknow; he started out in extortion, now he’s cornered the Mandrax trade. His gang runs several labs on the streets, they make the tablets in the hundreds of thousands; their chemist, Subhash Bose, is a genius. His work has spread to South Africa, Kenya, Mozambique. They ship it out disguised as paracetamol. They ship it in here too, with the complicity of the doctors and the guards. Everyone wants a taste. You can pop the pill for an easy high. Even better, take a beer bottle, smash its body on the ground . . . instead of cutting someone’s face, take the neck spout, fill its bowl with punctured cardboard, tobacco, and Idukki Gold, sprinkle in the crushed dust of the Mandrax pill, light it all up, inhale through the neck, then prepare for euphoria and the inky blackness of the womb.
* * *
—
Sikandar was a coconut-wala outside. He ran a stall on the edge of Lucknow, a shed and a table and a white light, some goats tied up and some chickens running around. His uncle with a fruit stall next door. Sikandar told everyone he had a plantation in Karnataka, that he owned so much land you could walk across it for days, and everyone laughed, no one believed that. But he had the best coconuts, and often they were free. Someone would buy four and he’d throw in two more. “Baksheesh.” He’d do it with everyone. You wanted one, he gave two. “Baksheesh.” You wanted ten, he threw in fifteen. “Baksheesh.” He’d toss a tender coconut in the air with his eyes closed, catch it in his left palm, chop the head at the moment of landing, toss in a straw. Chop, chop, chop. Laughing, wielding his machete. Joking with anyone who came. The cops came to be teased by him. The goons came to be teased by him. He knew everything that happened on the street. He was a butcher for Satya Acharya on the side. “A head is like a human coconut,” he says. He’s in a reflective mood. He swings his imaginary machete and sees the brain exposed as the body falls. He misses his favorite one. And his second wife. She died. We were here in Delhi, he tells Ajay. The city went to her head. She flirted with an ice-cream vendor; he saw it with his eyes. He couldn’t accept that. He killed her in front of India Gate. All around him, the ice-cream-eating kids, couples lying on the grass, and there he was, beating her to death for the smile she gave. That’s why he was in jail. But it’s all right. He represents Satya Acharya from the cell. He has mobile phones, a TV, his heater, his AC, minions, he’s doing just fine. He only misses his machete and his coconuts, and his second wife.
* * *
—
He is Satya Acharya’s eyes and ears and teeth and fists and hammer and club and blade. He marshals troops with blood and sweat and fear. They have more than eighty men in here. They’re at war with some, like the Gupta gang. They have uneasy alliances with others, like the Sissodias. When it’s time to go out into the yard, they come together, the allied gangs, to trade information and goods. The Acharyas form a mass with Sikandar at the center, reclining on a cane seat, looking up at the winter sun with bliss in his heart.
* * *
—
“Is it true?” one of the men asks. “Is it true you work for him?”
The question is not for Sikandar. The “him” in question is not Acharya.
The huddle of men fall quiet and wait for Ajay to speak.
Ajay, a ghost in a safari suit.
“Shut up, fucker,” Sikandar says. “Do you want me to break your skull?”
“How did you hurt those chutiyas so bad?” another asks. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“Shut up!” Sikandar yells. “Any fucker can do that. I’ll break all your skulls right now.”
“But look at him,” one of the men cries, “he’s half your size. He really taught those fuckers a lesson. Maybe he could even kill you!”
“No one kills me!” Sikandar says, rising from his cane throne, “except God himself.”
“Gautam Rathore,” Ajay says in a hollow voice. “I work for Gautam Rathore.”